Curt Jaimungal

This episode is about math after AI started solving its open problems. Scott Aaronson, director of the Quantum Information Center at UT Austin, joins to explain why there is no making this go away. We discuss who gets credit for AI proofs, what is left for PhD students, and OpenAI’s apparent proof of the unique games conjecture. His wife, the complexity theorist Dana Moshkovitz, has worked on that conjecture since they met. The conversation also covers whether a lab that proved P equals NP should release it, and how AI overturned a conjecture he and Greg Kuperberg posed, with consequences for black hole firewalls. We end with Maxwell’s demon and why he thinks integrated information theory is wrong. youtu.be/3yXtXTwz4J4

When Michael Levin (@drmichaellevin) planned to change the voltage of embryo cells, someone wrote to his postdoc mentor saying he’d had a mental breakdown. Membrane voltage was thought to be mere housekeeping. Then a graduate student found the embryos covered in black dots. They were eyes. Full episode: youtu.be/c8iFtaltX-s

This is a podcast about whether AI could discover the laws of physics before we do. Hirosi Ooguri @PlanckScale, chair of Caltech’s Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy, joins for his first English podcast to explain why AI has moved faster in mathematics than in physics. He fears it could solve physics in a way we cannot understand. We discuss why quantum field theory lacks a firm mathematical foundation, quantum gravity as the “final boss,” the swampland distance conjecture he proposed with Cumrun Vafa, and his estimate that, left to humans, verifying string theory could take 2,250 years. The conversation also covers the PhD thesis numbers that turned up in a Mathieu group table twenty years later. What an honor. youtu.be/jCutz701TGo

Sean Carroll (@seanmcarroll) doesn’t care whether a new theory comes from an actor or a physics PhD. He cares whether its author understands the theory it would replace, the Standard Model. His advice: open by saying why physicists will be skeptical, then show why those reasons don’t apply. Full episode: youtu.be/9AoRxtYZrZo

In January, Jonathan Gorard (@getjonwithit) was confident AI couldn’t produce a machine-checked Lean proof of Maryna Viazovska’s Fields Medal sphere-packing result before late 2027. By March, one existed. He says the real story turned out to be complicated. Full episode: youtu.be/oQypVVv1u1o

I now have a book deal with Penguin Press for a book titled The Edge of Everything. What questions about reality/physics/etc. has no book answered for you that you’d like to see answered/tackled? What would you like to read in such a book?